M&A in the Insurance Industry | What Drives Agency Value

Hey, hey, welcome back to the Accelerate Your Insurance Sales podcast. Andy Neary here, CEO and founder of Complete Game Consulting. Almost forgot the name of my business. I'm— well, I'm excited today. I've got James Graham joining me from Marshberry, one of the managing directors at Marshberry, and we're going to have a nice little conversation about kind of a State of the Union of M&A in the insurance industry. So, James, welcome aboard.

No, thank you. Excited to be here, Andrew.

So I actually like to start interviews even before us getting into like what we're going to talk about today. I love people to get to know you a little bit, you know, doing some research and, you know, some feedback you gave me before the episodes. It sounds to me like numbers and math have always been in your background. You made a comment, you said that you decided you wanted to get into finance and economics after reading the Thomas Sowell Basic economics in junior high. So, that's pretty early in one's career to understand you want to make finance and economics a part of your career. But has that always been a big piece of what you wanted to do with your business career?

Yeah. I was blessed to have a father that tried to help us identify our interests young, and he would give us lots of books. And that was the book that grabbed my attention early on. And it's about how do you distribute resources, how you strive with the value-wise. And so, very young, I got very interested in the topic. I'm blessed to have had the same through line where everything I studied had the intent to where I'm at today. So I didn't have the adventure of going off in a different direction and then finding something else, which is totally fine. A lot of people do that, but had the same through line the whole time.

So let's, let's talk about Marshberry for a second. You've been there, what, a little over a decade?

A little over a decade. Yeah. And the firm has grown and changed quite a bit over that period of time along with the industry.

So I'm going to ask a question that I would say most wouldn't have to worry about, but I'm going to be the ignorant one. So, let's just start with who the heck is Marshberry?

Yeah, Marshberry, I think at this point, if you count by employee and client base, is the largest consultant and investment bank in the insurance distribution vertical along with wealth management. And our whole lens is to be a data-first company to help owners of their companies increase the value of their firms. So everything we build, everything we've done is around helping owners increase the value of the firms. We started— this is still in our DNA— with a contract with Hewlett-Packard to help agencies benchmark their financials. And that's still the core of what we do is benchmarking and data and collecting data to make sure that we're actually providing insights based on facts and then helping agency owners make decisions that increase the value of their firm. So that's the baseline of who we are and what we do.

Yeah, we have several clients we work with today that are very— I would describe them as very happy members of Marshberry. In fact, I think our connection originally was through one of our clients.

One of your clients, yeah, that spoke very highly of your firm and your services.

Yeah, and likewise.

Yeah, likewise.

Well, we're going to dive into some M&A notes, kind of the State of the Union, but let's start with the most basic question. Why would an agency ever want to sell?

Yeah, and the reasons— that's a great question. Thanks for asking. And the reasons vary quite widely. I think a lot of it, though, comes to a point where there's different categories of why agencies sell. Category 1 is it's a life insurance planning situation where you can't take the equity with you to the grave and you have to do something with your business to ensure the long-term stability for your employees and for your clients. So it's something that you have to do at some point if you're thinking about the best for your firm. There are people then who recognize that they can accomplish— and this is the best seller, the one that recognizes they've taken the firm to a point where they can't continue to get the growth rates that they've been getting, and then they partner with someone to get to help them accelerate the growth. And those are the clients that we're really looking for. And then there are on the sell side, then there are Individuals that they just don't have the gas in the tank. They don't want to be the leader anymore. There's that, or they need the final— you'll see a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of our clients are financial entrepreneurs, their kids go to college, they've been clipping pretty good coupons off the agency, but now they need that lump sum and they're ready to kind of like transition their life. And so, they'll do a sale because they have capital needs. That might drive them to do it. So those are like the macro buckets. Again, the focus, though, is to try to tell our clients that you get maximum value by focusing on being a good operator and to grow your firm. And then when you make the decision to sell, because you recognize that that's a 2 plus 2 or 1 plus 1 equals 3 for both of you and the buyer, not just I'm trying to get a liquidity event because I have to. And then also think about when you're thinking about that, like the return on your capital. If you have an agency that's flat, it's not growing, you own equity in that. That's like any other investment that you have. If you can't grow at sort of double-digit organic growth or double-digit growth, if you can do inorganic accretively, which is very difficult in this market, then you are losing wealth every year that you hold that no-growth agency. Where if you do a transaction and you partner with someone that can help you unlock more value, you can, you can turn that equity story around where you're not losing wealth. And so that's something a lot of agencies don't think about because they're happy to— and we see it all the time— someone who held on their agency with no growth, who would have had an equity check that would have been meaningful from an inflation standpoint, you know, 20 years ago. Their agency hasn't grown. They might be able to get the still nominal dollars, but the purchasing power is way less. And they lost all the time in the market they could have had. In a diversified index fund and all the time they could have partnered with someone that knew how to grow equity. So, it's also like, you know, just understanding that as you grow your business, you need to focus on high growth to make it a good investment because it is an investment whether you recognize it or not. Growth is essential. And if you can't do it or you recognize that you could do it better with somebody else to like look for that.

It's interesting you bring that up because I think there's a lot of agencies out there who, you know, they hold that pitchfork of independence so strongly.

By the carriers.

And it's almost to their detriment because if they are so focused on being independent yet haven't been focused on actually growing the agency, I guess I didn't even think of it that way. Every year you fight to stay independent yet not— are not growing, you're literally losing wealth.

Really? Yeah. And so, I mean, we're a huge fan of independence at Marsh Berry, and we want our clients to be independent. And like, the client that introduced us has been independent for longer than most and done it very successfully. But you have to grow. So the key to independence, the drum cry of Marsh Berry to our clients is the key to independence is above average organic growth. That's what allows you to do it. So it's not independence at all costs. It's independence with a purpose. And so that you can actually build something. And it's good— growth is good for everybody in your organization, not just the owner.

You brought up a point too that I think I've really come to learn sitting in my position I sit in now at Complete Game Consulting, which is there's a very big difference between selling insurance and running an agency.

Yes.

And I think there's a lot of agency owners out there who've been very good at selling insurance, not necessarily operating an agency.

Yes. And yeah, that's a— go ahead.

I was just gonna say that becomes very clear over time.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we see that.

I was curious, statistically, do you guys have any statistics, and maybe you don't, between when somebody does decide to sell, is it more because they're wanting to get out or more because, hey, I want to keep this growing, but I know I've taken it to a point where I've kind of hit a ceiling in what I'm able to do, and I need those resources to continue keeping it growing?

Yeah. So, that's hard to have a stat on because it's not like most people are conflicted, right, on their— it's normally kind of like a, you know, it's a spectrum of where people feel when they make that decision, right? Most of our clients that achieve the highest valuations are the people that are selling for the right reasons. They want to grow. It's clear they want to grow, and they're doing it to partner with someone to grow. And in this market, that's where the high valuations are. So it used to be a few years ago— we'll talk a little bit about this— where valuations were high for everyone. Valuations are still very high, but it's not high for everyone anymore. Like, we have a spread. And so the people that sell for the right reasons they're going to get better representation. They're going to work with us probably over like a business broker, and they're going to likely sell for a much higher price to higher quality organizations. Where if you're selling to get out, you can't really hide it and the value is not going to be there. And the agency growth rate probably already is plateaued, and in the soft market we're entering, probably negative.

Yeah, you bring up a really good point. I think it wasn't all that long ago, it was almost like it was kind of a math equation. I remember when I started Complete Game Consulting, James, I had a peer of mine tell me how— politely tell me I was an idiot for starting this business because he's like, go start an agency, you just got to get it to $1 million and you can sell it for 4.

Right, right.

Like it was a math equation, right?

And so for a whole like 24 months.

But yeah, let's, uh, let's, um, let's get right to it with the— what does the current state of the M&A market look like?

So it's still frothy and hot and valuations are still high. Like it's still very healthy. Like in 2025, we saw 854 transactions, which is an increase over 2024 at 847. It's the third highest year on record. The highest years being '21 where we had so much free money, it was hard not to sell a business, period. Like M&A was hot across the entire, all industries. And then 2022 has some of that overhang before cost of capital went up. So it's still very healthy. But what we've seen is we've seen a spread in value between what I will call low and high quality firms, largely driven by, and high quality generally means a few things, right? Higher organic growth rates. Is one, with sustainable, predictable reasons to believe that they can continue, right? It wasn't like a fluke. Quality accounts, so they have a good mixture of like high-end commercial accounts or group benefit accounts. They have good clients and they're providing high expertise. It's not commodified. And then they have reasonably young talent that's driving the growth of the firm. Like when I say reasonably young, like The average age of people driving value isn't in their 60s, they're in their 40s and 50s. And you can see a pipeline of even younger people coming up. If you have those things, valuations are as strong now as they have been over the last 5 years. If you don't have those things, if you're a single operator who's getting towards retirement and your book of business is maybe even more transactional, smaller accounts, the valuations have come down. And the buyer universe is limited. So it's just that you got— there's more discipline in the M&A market, but prices have remained high and they're still coming.

The money's still there. It's just being deployed probably with a little more criticism than it was.

Yeah, people have figured out the industry a little bit and there's— and money costs things. Money has an expense to it now, right? Where it was free a few years ago. So people are more disciplined.

Would you still label the market a seller's market or has that shifted?

For a high-quality firm, it is still a seller's market. It is ultimately still a seller's market. For a low-quality firm, not as much again. But for your— I know a lot of your clients that you work with that were mutual clients, for those firms, it's a seller's market.

Okay. That's good to know. Are you seeing— I'd be curious, what do you typically see When it comes to an actual M&A transaction, what do you typically see as some of the biggest disconnects between the seller, what they expect, and what the buyer is willing to do?

Yeah. So, it comes in lots of different forms. Often, it's— the biggest disconnect often is a seller doesn't necessarily internalize the marginal cost over certain thresholds. So, buyers typically have certain underwriting principles, just like a carrier would. Of how much they can do. And when you bump up against the top of those underwriting thresholds, like if they're being very aggressive and a seller says, well, I just want another like half a million dollars, even though they're in there, let's say they're getting like, you know, $40 million. It doesn't seem like a big number versus the, like the, the ask doesn't seem big compared to the total number, but when they're already stretched on, you know, everything they can do, it's sometimes they just can't get there. So I think often it's on the margin. Where the seller and the buyers in this market are having disagreements. It's not on like the big points, right? The sellers kind of know that they're in high demand. They know what the valuations are within a range, although they don't necessarily know how to maximize them. But it's really on those margin things. The other thing is just how important it is that you have control of your business. And what I mean by that, it's not uncommon for people to add a lot of 1099s or add people with non-restrictive covenants or have on-paper referral relationships where, you know, it's questionable legally who owns an account all those things can lead to detractions in revenue when you get to a sale and an owner like, well, I've been collecting the cash flow this whole time, like, why wouldn't a buyer pay me for that cash flow? So the buyer needs clear title to the relationships. And if you didn't title all those things, to use that word like loosely, right, if you didn't paper all of it, then a buyer can't pay you for it, at least not a disciplined buyer. And so those are where we find the most disconnects is on those types of topics.

So the more ownership you have of the revenue you bring in, the better, right?

And you can't just cut expenses to drive value infinitum. So like some sellers would say, well, oh, so it's a function of EBITDA, so I'll just take my comp to zero. And it's like, well, there's value to the labor, whether it's you or someone else. It costs somebody, it costs money to do what you're doing. You can't just set your comp to zero. And do people run those kind of processes and get bids on those kind of processes from time to time? Yes. But like Generally, you're actually losing probably total value if you're going to market with that kind of strategy.

Yeah. Are there any, are there, you know, certain metrics that buyers are really scrutinizing today that they may not have 5, 6 years ago?

Well, the big one is like we started the conversation, organic growth and how, and is it real? Like because we saw EBITDA multiples and valuations increase from sort of 2013 through through, you know, 2022, and now we've been at a plateau the last 4 years. Organic growth was always important, but it wasn't as scrutinized as it is today because pricing was lower and we had multiple expansion on the back end. So they were getting growth, whether like from an equity value perspective where the agency didn't grow either, and you had a hard market that showed up and all of that that further justified. So real organic growth, you actually seen an increase in client count, seeing larger new clients come on is probably the— we call it Q of G, quality of growth. It's probably the first thing people are really looking at. The second thing is EBITDA margins have been more scrutinized. So during '21 and '22, when capital was free, you saw average EBITDA margins approach ranges that were sort of divorced from how agencies operated, and it was another way for buyers to pay more. We're not seeing that anymore. So even the margins are, are like, they have to be sustainable. The buyer has to know that if you're saying you run at a 35% margin and you never have, that everyone believes you can actually do it, right? Yeah. And so that's gotten a lot stricter. Um, the assumptions, they don't have as much flexibility as they used to because the cash flow has to show up for everything to pencil. Now they don't have baked in from a buyer's perspective They don't have a baked-in belief that their EBITDA multiple on their value is going to go up like it did the last 10, 15 years. It might, in my line of work, we all hope it does, but it's been flat the last 4 years. There's been downward pressure this year in the public markets. If you go look at the publicly traded equities, you can see how the public markets are thinking about it. And so you can feel that they feel that pressure, which means they just have to be more disciplined on the cash flow.

How would you— I'd love your opinion on this. You know, we work with a lot of agencies, and I think one of our core beliefs here is a lot of agencies struggle with organic growth these days.

Oh, yeah.

Hence why M&A becomes such an appealing growth mechanism. You guys see that at Marshberry? You guys seeing similar things? I just feel like organic growth is harder to come by these days than it used to be.

Yeah, well, you think about it, they all lived through 4 years of a hard market where everyone grew 10% by just renewing their accounts, or they were actually shrinking in the background. And you know this from your clients. So our data suggests the same thing. We're seeing organic growth rates come down. If you look at the— just as a data point, the public brokers' Q4 of 2024 organic growth rate was 9.6%. So it's the big guys, right?

And that's including renewal, renewed business, right?

Organic. Yeah. Yes. Including new business. Not— that's not sales. That's not new business. That's just growth overall. Their organic growth rate at the end of 2025 was 3.4%.

So 9 point what?

9.6 to 3.4. Wow. So that explains why you feel the pressure in their stock value, right? So what the public brokers are feeling, all our clients are feeling too. It's just the market on the property side is softening.. And we are seeing in our data that organic growth is coming down. And what people, you know, if you're an agency owner and you're growing 10% a year with, but you really weren't growing, it was just the market exposure, the water's out and you're naked. And so that's the, that's the industry at large right now. And so there's been a lot of articles talking about this, that where's organic growth? How do you drive organic growth? And it's become a challenge. I think the hard market didn't help because it was harder to, to keep your clients because they were angry at you because you're, premiums are going up, but you at the same time at the end of the year, like, well, we grew. And so your producers are kind of focused on that. And we do have a chronic problem of agencies underinvesting in support staff and sort of that middle office roles to enable the producer to be a relationship individual. And when you overpay producers on renewals, you make them a shepherd over a flock of renewals. Like, you're not really incentivizing where they need to be, which is at the tip of the spear and not back in the office, you know, being the greatest account executive. Um, and so it is, it is a challenge right now.

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And a lot of—

yeah, I, I agree. I think there's, there's definitely a pandemic of producers acting like glorified account managers. Yeah, they're spending way too much time on the client side. And I have had several conversations with agency executives in the last year. To your point, where they used to be our organic growth just on renewing business, 7-8%. This year we're only looking at 2%.

Right.

And it's, it's really making them go, oh, we've got to get people hunting again. And I'm hearing numbers from some of the bigger firms, you know, being behind on their new business organic goals by 7 and 8 figures.

Yeah. No, we're seeing the same thing on the bigger firms. So we probably have some of the same overlap. Right. And it's the same thing.

It is. I would say it's a very, very good question to be asking in 2026, which is how do you grow organically? Honestly, it's why one of the reasons I built this business, James, I feel like we have a solution for it, but it is our, it is our our battle cry. It's like nobody knows how to grow organically right now.

Right, right. Yeah.

What's the challenge? What, um, I'd be curious thinking about the M&A process itself. I've known a few friends of mine that have approached or gone on to sell their businesses, but maybe even had some failed attempts before they crossed the finish line successfully. What are some of the most common reasons right now a deal falls apart late, you know, in the M&A process or late in the process? What are, what are some of the typical reasons why it would fall apart?

So if we're involved as an advisor, deals are going to close like 99% of the time, roughly. Like I'm using that not as an exact figure, just to be clear on that, but it's like some huge percentage of the time, like our deals are going to, are going to close. The most common reason a deal doesn't close is normally mismatched expectations between the buyer and seller that don't get uncovered till closing. So you have a situation where, so if you have an unadvised, if you're unadvised as an agency owner, if you're $10 million in revenue, you work exclusively with a buyer to come up with EBITDA. They don't have all your, they don't have all the detail on your data, but they sell you on a big number. They're trying to keep you out of the market. You're trying to keep you from hiring an advisor. You go down the road with them, they're controlling the whole process. You can kind of feel towards the end that maybe you're not getting the deal that you thought. Like, then you start asking for things, but they're not going to give them to you because they've already underwritten the deal. So that's, that's, that can, you can get mismatched expectations because you didn't, they weren't set right the first time to begin with. The most common reason that a deal is being represented falls apart is because something materially changed in the seller from the time that the deal was written on the LOI to closing. They lost their largest account. Their top producers won't sign the buyer's Producer agreements. They got them— if they're an MGA, the market pulled, like they lost their paper. Like these are the kind of things that'll like kill a deal. It's something that went negative. Most buyers in the space, if they work in an advised process, won't be the reason why the deal doesn't happen as long as things are maintained because they have a reputation to withhold. So while that's not universal, there are some actors out there as we've increased the number of buyers from, you know, like 5 to 60 over the last 15 years. There are some actors that aren't necessarily as ethical as others, but in general, like, it's normally coming from something changing in the seller's business.

So I don't know if I've ever actually shared this. So I was at an agency 10 years ago and it ultimately ended up selling.

Mm-hmm.

And I was a big piece of the sale because I was one of the main producers. Yeah. And when I realized there was a shift in who was going to purchase the agency in the 11th hour.

Okay.

Yeah, it was a, it was kind of a unique situation where it was going to be the mothership was going to buy us, but then one of the mothership's larger entities underneath it ended up buying.

Uh-huh.

Yeah. And so I decided at the end, I don't think this is a fit for me.

Right.

And I ended up leaving. And 2 or 3 years later, I ran into one of the gentlemen that was a part of the M&A deal from the buyer's side at a conference. He's like, what happened? I'm like, what are you talking about? He said, why did you leave?

Yeah.

And so I gave him my reasons, but he said, he said that almost killed the entire deal. Oh, and you're right, because when I keep hearing about a producer leaving, I've experienced that because I didn't realize my decision to walk away almost killed the deal, right?

Yeah. No, I mean, it changes the metrics, right? Because presumably there was some amount of relationship count, relationships that are like, those are your relationships.

Yeah. What about the seller? You know, I'd love to know from a seller perspective, do you, do you often see some common— I guess I don't know what I want to say— is maybe where they overestimate their readiness to sell. You know, an agency owner thinks they're ready to sell, but you look at it, you go, man, that now is not the time.

Actually, your comment about like the challenge of you're the really great producer. Often these are founders that are really great salespeople that necessarily aren't great operators. That kind of describes the industry on average, right? So, so like, you know, you ask them to produce financials and you get them like 6 weeks later and you're like, when you go to a big firm, you're going to have to close your books within like 3 days or like a day. And so you can't even close your books in a reasonable amount of time. So, so there is, it is not uncommon that firms think, they think it's not, I'll talk to people that are thinking about signing all the time. We're like, well, I'm just gonna, when I, when I'm ready to pull the trigger, I'm gonna call you and we're gonna do the deal in like 2 months. And you know that their books are a mess. You know their systems are a mess. And you're like, you're, it's gonna take a year just to like get our understanding of what's going on in there to make sure that everything's going well. So our encouragement is be involved with us very early in firms' life cycles so they get used to pulling financials, they get used to looking at metrics that investors would care about. So they kind of build a discipline around like planning so that when they get to the point to pull the trigger, that only increases their value because it shows that they're organized and they're thinking about the business. They actually know their numbers, they can pull it. And we've seen this issue not just with founder-led sort of you know, middle market firms, the average insurance agency, some of the bigger brokers have struggled to get good valuations on their recapitalizations because they weren't able to pull data in a reasonable amount of time because they didn't integrate properly over it. Right. And so they're doing everything in Excel sheets. So I can't stress enough to firm owners that having a good control over your numbers and ability to produce financial reports and dashboarding on a real-time basis and really understand what's going on in your business is very valuable when it comes to the time to exit. And don't kid yourself that you won't eventually likely sell the business because the truth is everyone sells their equity. It's just a matter to who. Well said. Yeah.

Should an agency— you have any recommendations like how far in advance? Okay. If an agency thinks selling is an opportunity, do you kind of have a benchmark as how far in advance they should be thinking about this?

We think that you should be running your business as if you're going to sell it. Okay. So from day one. So you should be working with someone like us on a consulting basis to say, if I had to sell my business this year, here's where I'm at. What do I need to do?

Got it.

And we'll have those conversations with agency owners all day long and we'll even give 10 points for like 30 minutes. We don't even have to have a formal like relationship, just like, you know, we'll, we'll do a lot of consulting to build relationships with people. At no real charge just to get in the door and get to know them and help them out. But you should be running your business as if it's for sale, even if that metric is like 20 years away. I have one client I met. This is a good story. He was $400,000 in revenue 4 or 5 years ago, and he was thinking about— he grew to like $700,000, had a deal, was thinking about selling, decided not to. Him and I worked together pretty closely, like Andy Neary, and he's a member of our peer exchange network Connect. He's grown to over $5 million revenue in 5 years, crushing it. And he's running the business as if he could sell it at any moment. But he's very hyper-focused on everything he needs to do, every decision he needs to make. How does it affect the value of the firm? So whenever he decides to make that, that decision, he'll be ready to go and get maximum value or whatever the time and the market at the time.

With that said, I'd love to know your thoughts because we talked about this earlier. There's a big difference between selling insurance and operating an agency.

Yeah.

Are there certain characteristics you look for in an agency that tell you that, okay, based on the way they run this thing, they are very scalable?

Yeah. So I would think the first characteristic that I look for in a founder, and this is me personally, not necessarily like a Marshberry talking point. Is do they have the ability— and this is funny because this applies to like everything in life when it comes to finance— to defer like the pleasure of the income today for like future growth. That's really what you're looking for, right? Can you delay gratification? Because commonly what will stranglehold an agency is the owners sucking everything out of the agency because of their lifestyle.

Lifestyle business, baby.

Yeah, it becomes it becomes— the lifestyle business becomes a trap because you can't grow it because you spent every incremental dollar you've made on things that go down in value, right, rather than helping grow your business. And so, I think that's the first thing is you have to see leaders that are willing to take a sacrifice in their personal consumption for the good of the business, for something greater. And that's number one. And that's just like most humans don't do that. Right. So, and they're willing and then they're, and then they're not so expense conscious, you know, that, because often like when you invest in people, as you know, like training salespeople and pretty like it's a volatile game. It's, you know, even at the best success rates are low success rates versus like what people want. And you have to put a lot of extra hours in. So you have to be willing to grind. Like if you want to grow your business as like past certain thresholds, you have to be willing to grind pretty hard as a leader and wear a lot of hats and not get paid incrementally for it. Delayed gratification again. You'll get it. You'll get it. It'll be worth it to you financially, but it could be 5 to 10 years later. And then the last thing is the ability to sort of build leaders and delegate because you have to be able to replicate yourself. If you want to be a $30 million revenue firm, you can't be run on a sole personality, at least not and have any quality in the firm. So you have to be able to replicate leadership across the organization. And so even when you find delayed gratification and the ability to work really hard, you do find a subset of people that struggle to replicate leadership.

I got to tell you, James, it was refreshing to hear you say that because when I started Complete Game Consulting, I think people look at a business like mine, which is coaching consulting, and go, all right, how the heck are you ever going to sell that thing? And I had a mentor early on who came on to help me, who was kind of always had me make business decisions from that perspective of what would it look like? What do you need to do if you wanted to sell this someday?

Right.

And I think that's how we've approached a lot of our decisions. You know, the growing horizontally before you grow vertically, you got to go find the people. And then that delayed gratification, instead of taking the money to go to go buy the toys, it's reinvesting the money back in the business. Right, right.

Yeah.

Those have been very, very big pieces of advice. Very big, I guess, nuggets of advice for me that have helped me with this business. And it's not always what you want to do, but it's what you need to do if you're going to keep the business growing.

Yeah, the decisions have to be hard necessarily, or they wouldn't be extraordinary.

Right. What— let's, let's take a minute or two just to maybe talk a little bit more about Marshberry. You know, we get a lot of agency executives and sales leaders that listen into this show. For some of those out there who haven't, you know, who aren't a part of the organization or haven't become a member, talk a little bit about what you guys are doing and why an agency might want to consider becoming a member.

Yeah. So we talk membership specifically would refer to our peer exchange network, which does have some criteria. I mean, you need to be roughly over $3 million in revenue on the small end. Most of the groups are $8 to $20 million revenue groups, and we have groups all the way up to $100 million that includes some of the largest brokers in the country. So, you got to be over a certain size, right, to become part of it. And the peer exchange network Connect, where I spend a lot of my time, it is the premier networking— think of like a Vistage or, you know, young professionals, but it's focused on brokerage. So you're in the room with peers, non-competitive peers, sharing benchmark financials that have been reviewed by us. So they're not just you sending out what you think. You're not making representations and lying, you know, or telling fish stories about how big you are, how great everything is. So when you're in the room and you say, you know, I did XYZ, well, your organic growth number is on the screen. Everybody could see it. So you can't just say I did XYZ.

I know because I hear it from our clients who attend those events.

So it's transparent, which means that you can really weight advice and strategies and other things that are more soft than that. So we as consultants, like what you do and what I do when we're consulting firms, we're coming at it as people that observe lots of people that do this, and we try to bring the patterns that we see, to our clients. When you're sitting in the peer exchange, um, situation with your peers, you're hearing from the people that are living what you're doing. So you're not just getting advice from a consultant, you're getting advice from someone that actually is implementing and dealing with their same problems. So it's another level of sort of awareness of what you're going through and camaraderie, because we all know at the top leadership is lonely. You get to build relationships with people that are experiencing the same thing you are experiencing. So I can't think— like, I've worked at Deloitte Consulting, I worked at KPMG, I've seen lots of consulting organizations and lots of platforms, lots of ways people approach it. The peer exchange model that we've built for insurance brokerage at Marshberry is special, and I can't— I don't think I can't say enough positive things about it and how someone should be able to join, why, and why someone should join. We— it's relatively inexpensive, you get benchmark financials, you're talking to people that are going through what you're talking through. You have on-call access to our entire team to answer any questions that you have about the industry. We have, you know, access to a carrier placement team if you need difficult risks that you have a hard time placing within your markets, that is complimentary. We have a team that does that. So there's just so many benefits that you get as an agency principal for being part of that.

If somebody were listening in and wanted more information about the Peer Exchange Network, what is the easiest way to get in touch with you or Marshberry?

Just email me at james.gram@marshberry.com is the easiest way. If you go to our website— G-R-A-H-A-M. Yep, just like the cracker. The easiest name to find. If you go to our website, there's plenty of landing pages and things you can do to get ahold of us as well. But emailing me directly. And then we have an application process. It's all very easy. We hold your hand. But the next real opportunity— you can join at any time if you're accepted as a member. You have to go through a vetting process. The next meeting that we'll have is actually in the fall, and it will be in Austin in September. Great.

Well, it's been an honor to have you, James. I really appreciate the intel you've been— you've provided. I'm sure there are plenty of agency executives that wanted that information today. I'm sure there are plenty of grateful people that— grateful people out there because you joined the show. Let's bring it home with one question. If I've got an agency executive listening in right now and this has been floating around in their head, the opportunity to potentially sell and get their business to the finish line, given the market the way it is right now, the M&A market, the commercial markets and the benefit markets, soft, hard, all in between. What advice— what would be the biggest piece of advice you'd give that agency owner?

Well, other than talk to us about like the details, because the details in that scenario matter a lot. So it's hard to give like an overbrush. But the other thing is, you know, do you think you can achieve above average organic growth rates over the next few years? And how are you going to do it? And that should be like the question that's drumming in your head is how are you going to grow? And if, and if you really have a challenge, you need to get this with someone who's going to help you grow.

So you're telling me the number one of the number one vehicles to optimize a sale in your agency in the next 3 to 4 years is organic growth? Absolutely. Thank you for giving me the best commercial I could ever have. James, this is why you should reach out to Complete Game Consulting. Absolutely. No, but James, it's been an honor, man. Like I said, I think there's a lot of people listening in that are very happy they tuned into this episode. So I want to thank you for your time. And if you're listening in, if you, if you are that executive right now who's considering a sale or, you know, a peer who is, please, please, please share this episode with them. I think they would be extremely grateful for you doing that. So, James, thank you.

Absolutely. Appreciate you having me on.

It's a pleasure. Everybody else, thank you for tuning in. Be good. And yeah, if you know anybody or you are looking for that acquisition, James is your guy. Reach out to Marshberry. Hey, if you're still in business right now, you don't you're not quite sure if you're going to sell or you're not interested, but you do want that peer exchange, get a hold of Marshberry. It's a fantastic organization. I want to say, James, we've got about a half dozen clients we work with that are Marshberry and absolutely love it.

So thank you.

Be good, everybody.